Summer Dream Journal
Toshio Matsumoto: Everything Visible Is Empty (1975)
05/25/2024
Had a dream that I was a bouncer at a hair salon that had a large set of stairs at the facade that I stood at the top of. One customer tried coming inside with a sheep and I told her that animals weren’t allowed inside. She leaves the sheep with me and we go on a walk together and I gave it a bath in tea because it looked like it had mange.
05/26/2024
Dreamt that I was riding my bike with some friends on the part of Route 31 where the old mall encircles (RIP). Nothing really happened, but it came to my mind that my sister had just confessed to me that this street is her default dream location. Like a liminal space to her. She told me that most of her dreams where nothing really happens or that she can’t remember take place here.
05/30/2024
I am night swimming (in my dream) and there is a DJ serenading my strokes forth and back. It ends up being Neon Indian.
05/31/2024
Today’s dream featured me walking through that one corridor in Union Station that has the shops in it, that then morphed into a giant area of itself in a classic liminal fashion. Walking outside it turned out to be the Woodfield Mall parking lot. I run into Scott and he picks me up and crashes his car through a sandwich shop. I leave, because I have to go to work. It was also the last day of school, and the AV club gave me their USB with Inland Empire on it since they had just finished watching it.
06/02/2024
Today in dreamworld, I embarked on a sprawling drive from FL to IL. A stranger I’ve never met was driving me. We stop at the store to buy donuts, and two foxy women inside attempt informing us of a secret door but we ignore them. I return “home” (though the location is actually unfamiliar) and begin roaming the campus of my old college. The exterior appeared to now have several overpasses that jutted out from the main building like a super highway.
06/03/2024
Yesterday’s shift bled into yesterday's dream. Behind my work there is a massive field, and at the end of the night I was walking through it. I came across a gulch and discovered a channel of water. There were two fishermen that had their catch laid out spread before them of hundreds of fish, and much to their gloating, had even told me that the creek had contained flamingos, which had been presented on spears that were fashioned into a fence/barrier. When suddenly, my couch was in my kitchen and I began drinking a fluorescent Aperol spritz out of a vase . . .
06/04/2024
Dreamt that the ocean was indoors.
06/05/2024
Terrible nightmare . . . I had an ataque de nervios in dreamworld. I actually woke up in a sweat straight out of a movie. It isn’t a wonder I felt like shit the whole day leading up to this. An old friend of mine was working on a classic muscle car at the house I grew up in. She told me that she was moving with her daughter to Alabama. I then went into my childhood bedroom and laid on the floor with the ceiling fan turned on high and began screaming into the gust. There were mirrors everywhere.
06/11/2024
In my dream last night, I was at a wedding where the priest had begun the ceremony without the bride (something that has happened to me before in waking life). I tried halting the proceedings, and the bartender from behind me says in a very Lynchian way: “It’s the lot!” I felt helpless. Later . . . I went to a party at a friend’s house and I am the first to arrive. Zoom out from the yard and we are eclipsed by an expansive parking lot, almost as if being viewed from outer space, where a grocery clerk is pushing a long snake of carts, Great Wall Of China-esque, for an unreasonable amount of time.
06/13/2024
I am in the middle of a staircase (in my dream) with an empty room at the top. The bottom of the stairs lead into a vast lake that is enclosed within a building that I must swim across or die trying. It is the last day of school again and everyone is on the other side in graduation gowns.
06/14/2024
I am working at a stable in my dream and the horses and I are laying on a great mound of hay eating pop tarts. A farmhand hops a turnstile along with two pugs and leaves his phone so I set out to return it. I hop in my car, and appear on a metropolitan overpass above the sea called the “Spontaneously Exploding Highway”. A semi truck explodes a quarter meter ahead of me for no reason. I pull over and there is an outdoor elevator in the middle of the bridge and see Nick Kroll performing some sort of visual illusion with his arms against the iron bars that I can’t quite describe in words, and tell him if he knew that this was the S.E.H. to which he seems impressed in my saying of such. Suddenly — I am sharing a SMALL flat with the Beatles that happens to be in a town that is “famous” for kidnapping (they chose the location as it was next door to a 99¢ store). I open the closet and several men stacked like sardines are being held hostage and pour out of the door. “But they’re Russian!” says Ringo.